Opinion by: Zachary Kelman
No, the GENIUS Act doesn’t remove all government control over money. It doesn’t make Bitcoin tax-free. It doesn’t “legalize” decentralized finance (DeFi). And no — it’s not a Trojan horse for a Mark-of-the-Beast-style CBDC, especially with the anti-CBDC provisions passed alongside it.
What the GENIUS Act does — and what we should cheer — is break the stranglehold that a handful of powerful banks and regulators have maintained over global dollar clearing for decades. It ends their monopoly on who gets access to clean dollars — and makes their quiet mandate to monitor how that money is used, and whether it aligns with political agendas in Washington or on Wall Street, far more difficult — perhaps even out of reach.
The GENIUS Act is the first real crack in a system drifting for years toward financial authoritarianism. Riding the wave of stablecoin-driven dollarization, it knocks the US financial apparatus off course from a surveillance-based regime. It steers it — imperfectly, but meaningfully — toward broader monetary freedom and global access to the still-stable reserve currency.
Though the torch-and-pitchfork crowd will accept nothing less than a crypto panacea, understanding this landmark legislation requires looking to crypto and banking history rather than recent social media outrage.
The crypto dream
When I left traditional finance for crypto over a decade ago, I had a “Crypto Dream” and a “Crypto Nightmare.” The dream was that Bitcoin specifically, and crypto more broadly, would become a better form of money for people, especially those who lacked access to it — a kind of public utility that fueled growth and improved lives.
For that to happen, Bitcoin had to remain decentralized and untainted. That meant regulators keeping their grubby hands off it — and banks and institutionalists barred from co-opting it to preserve the status quo.
If the dream came true, every person could trade what they want, with whomever they want, using money that held real value — free from those who would debase it, surveil it or decide how better they should use it.
The crypto nightmare
The corollary, the crypto nightmare, was that Bitcoin and public blockchains would be repurposed to end money laundering — and in the process, end financial freedom. It’s the vision that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — then a Bitcoin critic, now the face of iBIT — outlined in 2017: “A true global digital currency” where “you…
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